ST. ANNE'S (2012)
MULLAGHBAWN
STILL
ST. ANNE’S
WALKWAY
DROPLET
LONDON PLANES
SINGULAR
THE PURE DROP
COMIC OPERA
CULDAFF
POEM FOR A CHRISTENING
DOOISH
SLEEPING HOUSES
WORDS
PAPER SONGS
NOTHING IS LOST
CARS
A WAX CLOCK
THE READING LAMP
BOBBIO
SOUTH
AN OLD SUN
EARTHENWARE
THE OTHER END OF THE LINE
GUITAR
CITIES
MULLAGHBAWN
The procession moves,
women watching from the front yard.
A low hum, a crunch of gravel
and they’re gone.
We won’t see them turn and murmur
those strange endearments to the newly-dead
but we know the chair will be left
exactly as it was – and the stool,
worn by thirty years of boot-heels.
Afterwards I wipe that sticky
grey glaur peculiar to wet graveyards
and look around at strangers.
He stood tall in company, like a lighthouse.
This I can imagine, knowing him little
but for a common affliction,
but I picture him falling like a tree
onto the silent grass
and pigeons, startled, fleeing the ivy.
His age, or an approximation, is whispered
by men who went to school with him.
They seem to have forgotten themselves,
their black-suited backs are straight as tombstones.
Beyond, hawthorn is about to seed,
it stretches in lines of unwashed white
as I manoeuvre the car for home
with a sense of turning my back
on the decencies of death – the wakehouse,
good china, sandwiches, relatives.
The square is quiet where I break
my journey and eat without company;
I look out at neatness, unseasonal irises.
I separate currencies discreetly
and reflect on the lack of tears,
the struggle for rectitude. We always want
what we can’t have. And now propriety
is alien to me: prized, within reach,
elusive as a dawn I’m doomed to sleep through.
I finish up. A tip, not a prayer,
for his memory. I settle for small change.
There is a price to be paid for that kind
of regard, for being a giant among men.
STILL
Past midday. Morning, a fever, abates,
and its rhythm fades, that unworldly beat
of being awake yet struggling to waken.
My thoughts are cool; they drip like a fountain
on the inside of my skull.
May is greening the cut-back hedges,
is moving fingers of light on the wall of the upper room,
dancing in dust round the table
that once held a porcelain bowl and a chipped ewer.
Amazed at what I can remember, that I can place
furniture where it must have been,
that a previous generation’s logic
has been unlocked in me, who barely knows
how to align two chairs,
I think of Sabine Sicaud, year old
in the first year of the war, dead at fifteen,
lively and knowing; who spoke to her fever
as Francis spoke to wolves – brothers, sisters
who besiege, who invade. She died
the year my mother was born,
a golden June, a promise.
Two bodies in those lengthening days, counting.
Three hearts beating, two, one. Still.
ST. ANNE'S
The pencil, pared to a spear-point,
snaps at the application of a thought.
Morning is over, all that remains of its promise
is a varnished press, a wall of faces
looking out from various faded summers:
my grandfather, kindly, sitting by the flowerbeds
we avoided like fire - my aunt's scalding voice
warning against football; children by a rockery,
a ghost hovering above the lens...
long days, the lawn smothered by daisies,
strawberry nets unfurled, tented on twigs.
Outside now, nature - old men on seats
mystified by what they've missed,
garden becoming field; our paths
no longer what they were. And the old hunger
still, something of the boy burning, a kick
of desire that can never be released,
a sadness at the height of summer.
Maybe, above all, we mourn the death
of tidiness, that moment, fixed in the mind,
when everything was relative, when the stars
were less even than their names,
and knowledge was a sea, not deep,
too far away to hem us in. And why
I have been running in my head
after an afternoon I never saw.
It has been a diving into dark
in hope of next day's dawn, a long forgetting
of things that can never be touched,
objects that become remote as mountains.
It is an ancient snare, that wish to be like Christ
ascending into his memories; to move and breathe
in a stain-glass world, lucent, radiant. I trace
the cold rim of a bell, I run my hand
along a picture-frame, and find myself
suddenly blessed by its dust.
THE WALKWAY
Half-paved, half-overgrown,
the walkway disappears.
The courtyard drips; a rain
from forty years ago
still shocks; the same sky lours.
Is there nothing new,
nothing to lift the mind
from grey flood and concrete?
The body needs must bend,
the gambler has to fold;
fifty years and fate
will bow the strongest neck.
And I have come back
in the mind’s eye at least
to what I know of old –
a glimmer in the rust;
voices of dead friends,
their stories never told,
who walked out into
an evening without end
– how young they were, how few
their likes today; a bar
of music, passing, gone;
Syd Barrett or John Clare
on their long walk home,
one to his mother’s garden,
the other an asylum.
And what remained undimmed
toward the end, what word
or snatch of song redeemed
the solitary years?
It seems however far
we look, however deep
inside or out, a wind
no stronger than a whisper
scatters what little truths
we’ve fastened on, and hope
takes refuge in the past.
But what to do when past
itself’s in disarray,
when the long falling out
accelerates, the brain
besieged from within
and life’s an endless loan
we borrow from ourselves
to loan ourselves again?
Here the Atlantic drips
from broken spouts, begins
its long journey back,
and coltsfoot among cracks
disperses in the gloom
ten thousand years of growth.
All sound, all mute. Perhaps
the energy of love
still radiates somewhere
not in waves, but drops:
youngsters on a path,
wildflowers by a grave,
birdsong rinsing air,
and our words too, an echo
of a time before words
when a silent hunger
was the only truth to follow.
DROPLET
In the yard, the roses have been beaten.
Day begins with a din, not of voices,
but crows and rain. Is this what four o’ clock’s
grey streak promised; for this, that vain
attempt to rest? It was a strange, languorous
unease, that hour when a horizon of doubt
clarified, and an old, ugly scar appeared
like a row of slum roofs I’d thought
had crumbled to make way for light and air.
But now the torrent promises exhaustion
and calm; all things blow themselves out
and into their opposite. The crow shakes a droplet
from its wing, and forages; the stem straightens.
Everything is one, in spite of its pulling apart.
LONDON PLANES
Birdsong and daffodils, and evidence
of the reflected rising sun’s first casualty,
down feathers on the pane, the finch
gone, merely stunned. On the table, plates
from the Book of British Trees: the black
and white days of Empire. How strong
they looked when I first turned the page
at six. I’d thought our trees were theirs,
that they’d come over, planted, left –
partly true at least, like all
our certainties – here we are,
calling to each other in the forest
of their words, hoping for a freedom
we cannot name – the bright clearing
of forgotten times.
SINGULAR
They come out briefly, early in the week,
putting out bins or watering a box
before the road begins to stir.
The door barely closes after them.
These are the men you see
at the end of a film, reduced to moving dots
as the camera pans from an ever-greater height
and the streets stretch to a maze;
men not married, not single; singular,
who know they've failed at the one thing
that really mattered; their lives an oddment
like the candle stub left on a table
after the last storm. For whom despair
is almost a comfort, a long, level tiredness,
or hope, the last warmth of sleep clinging
as they make their way through rooms
with large, empty fireplaces.
THE PURE DROP
All summer the stream
ran foul; a weakness
corrupting the bedrock, hidden
like an old sin
or a dream of dogs,
a cave-in compounded
by troubling earthworks
so far distant the mind
couldn’t connect cause
and effect. No ritual cleansed,
no drain or deepening
or quickening run
gave us a glimpse of the bed,
no glistening brightened
the eye. Earth and rust,
we carried that tack
in the cavern of our thoughts,
it lay on our palates like salt.
There was nothing to do,
the burden of waiting
heavier than silence.
Once I thought the ocean,
its waves, its film
of sand on the forehead,
would break the plane
of having nothing to give –
where there was an end
there must be a returning.
Instead there was a tang
of seaweed in caves,
dank as a dripping of walls.
The change when it came
could barely be seen,
a thread, a discharge of purity
weak like water in blood
or a promise in age.
COMIC OPERA
(Robert Wyatt)
Hearing that music now,
fresh, with no worm in my brain,
finally just as I am
I can rejoice in its sparseness,
each lyric on the page
a column, a single clean limb,
each song a spiral wound
round a beautiful emptiness
with the cleanness of water
full of its own hidden light,
teeming with a million unseen lives
and I know this is how
a note is meant to be,
complete, wrung, and belonging.
CULDAFF
(for Charles, Numi and Aphra)
Half past three, a prisoner of insomnia,
that cold wakefulness descending on the dark,
my thoughts are moving parallel, like blips
on a hospital screen; my mind is back
in Donegal, on a beach whose sand
is as varied as a city,
under a sky in whose swelling light
a fulmar loops and dances before plunging,
so tiny in the distance, so hypnotic.
In this here and now, this waking still,
every promise is cancelled and renewed
like a bird returning empty to the sky.
POEM FOR A CHRISTENING
In this place of hush and broken
silence, where the air brushes
cold tiles and all is space,
the warmth in your arms makes you
the centre, not just of here
but everywhere; among the smell
of old incense and long-dead feasts,
you step away from water, down
that single step you fretted on
going up. You know the world paused
when your child’s drowsy breathing
shuddered; how like an apple
in your palm you cradled her
to dab her forehead dry; and how
she slept. May she be baptised
by every waking light, the future
touch her lightly as that trickle.
For now, no matter that hopes
everywhere are falling like leaves;
you have been strong in the wind,
have hoped and found yourself.
You walk out into an air
heady with promise, a world
made greater by its helplessness.
DOOISH
Still the night fits come,
an intermittent pain, a sort
of sweating dry, a putting out
of trash daylight locked away.
But even in my dreams
I can imagine morning,
dogs in a mist rejoicing
at the smell of cold,
and light peeling the mountain from its cloud.
SLEEPING HOUSES
It doesn’t do to dwell on idyllic days
any more than it does to gaze at the sun.
Instead I go outside on an early morning
and look through the mist at the sleeping houses,
a crow here and there on chimney pots, no other stir,
and become, if I’m lucky, part of that rarity,.
a moment when enough is enough;
night drops away like ill-fitting clothes
and that longing for the clock to betray itself
is lost in the day’s first inevitable cold.
WORDS
The voice of a crazed child
has been following me all day,
keen as fresh air on a raw wound.
I passed the dull stream where frogs will spawn
and looked down at the town for the first time
white under a sky sharp
with the fragility of glass.
Yet the banging of his head against air
out-pierced the wind; the sky
suddenly broke into
a thousand blanks.
Such fears, such dreams
in his rocking frame!
Everything is beyond the power
of words, even my fretting over
a word not heard; nothing but the icy
clearness of day,
its being, its being gone; we, left behind.
PAPER SONGS
November brings its hedges, its spider cities
shimmering like airport lights,
an Aztec settlement abandoned but newly-minted
where jungle has been cleared.
Where did it come from, this hunger for symmetry,
since neither would be seen entire,
the spider’s perfection intended to be hidden?
There they were too, one chill morning
in a swollen drawer, those paper songs,
was melody so frail a breath would have broken it?
What other could I do but hum them soundlessly,
the notes arranging themselves in my head
the way glimpses fall in line to become a memory,
and there for a flash it was – film and soundtrack
perfectly aligned. Then the drop into dark
and silence. And when I looked again
I held blue beads on paper.
I put them back. To have played them
would have been dressing bones.
NOTHING IS LOST
(for Enda Whyte)
Lost again in this business of forgetting
I recall old people walking,
their firm steps, as if by rote
like your mother, straight-backed, clear-eyed,
doing the loop, returning to a house cold
to the touch of memory, the hearth gone,
the air warmed by foreign pipes,
her need suddenly a child’s, immediate, pure, incomprehensible
to those she reared, her rings so many shiny toys.
I imagine the ghost weight of your arms reaching out
to break a fall that hasn’t happened
and the long, one-sided leave-taking that shadows
ours to come; and a sense of forced readiness,
a tremor in the mind like the breaking
of language as it drifts further away
from its core. I craved silence once,
now it seems inevitable as night,
something whirrs like moth-wings in my brain,
the panic of release becoming worse
the more deadweight the burden;
then I remember that ship I saw
merging with the distance, passengers’ pale faces
shrunk beyond the fact of their still existing.
Perhaps we all sail into that vast calm
in the end; nothing is lost
because we never owned it in the first place; either side, sleep,
at the edge of sleep, a spark.
CARS
How your old man loved his machines!
Often I’d see him at night
bent double like a weaver at his loom,
wrestling the dark like Lear or Canute.
He knew he’d be mastered by what he destroyed;
I could imagine mice sniffing after he’d gone
then sheltering in the warmth he’d left behind.
In the end there was something strangely benign
in all that violence, lump-hammer and blade,
dead metal beaten and polished to life.
The wind blows today from the mountain,
out of the rain it feeds.
No one cares to tell how it came here,
we carry lightly our lack of mystery;
I remember the day you tried to run away:
at the other end of the world now
you have grown more transparent than your father.
We have so many words, so few stories;
though the music we made has worn well,
it was never really ours, was it,
in the end were we any different
from your father, cutting and swapping
or digging the same hole again and again
in the hope of finding something new?
I know you claimed to have done just that
though you never gave it a name,
it must have been no more than putting back
what you’d disturbed. So few have managed it;
I think of those metal frames lying discarded,
lyric sheets crumpled on an unswept floor.
Tomorrow his cars will be taken out,
smelling of grease and heavy leather,
to drive behind floats and green-bearded kids
reared on the fast-food truth of distraction.
You’ll be listening to a foreign station,
my other self, as you did when a boy
huddled under the blankets, the old songs
dying downstairs. Far from the flat swill
of what we’re handing on, stay whole, rooted
in the mirror of what you lost.
A WAX CLOCK
The black ribbon
telling me I might be going in
for the last time. A house bereft without music;
even its silence sang
when I knocked as a boy,
a consecrated hush –
set aside, as the Bible has it;
and now, with tea and biscuits, the piano echoing elsewhere
like a bird obeying an instinct that outwears time,
the low hum of conversation is measured in phrases,
their rise and fall
layered, bar on bar.
A white wax candle burns;
here I heard
pure wax burns in strict
time; the first clock. My music lesson ticked
as I learned more than music:
how it fits. And
how it fitted here,
the clock of knowledge,
love where the hands join.
A chime,
its ripples spreading still.
THE READING LAMP
Tilt the reading lamp toward
the floor, away from the shadow
of your lone undressing. The air
is still, between whistles, the window
pretending its perfect
fit. Why does the radio
broadcast on delay? This
is now, yesterday, last week,
and how to tell? Yes,
the remembered ending of recent books,
a glance at an opening sentence.
or a new meaning of the word forsake.
And the struggle not to be tired
of it all, how it wanes
and waxes, sometimes by the hour,
blue night and first silver moon
astonishing on a hidden shore
some other child, some consolation.
BOBBIO
Adrift at the edge of Europe,
dark moss on their feet,
they fell asleep to dreams
of beeves and blackbirds, dark woods
and narrow waters cleaving the heart.
Morning came with a fierce sky rocking,
stiff neck, throat dry,
the old unanswered question newly asked,
wine of the Fianna turned to water.
Then the boat faced, like a salmon, for France.
And I think sometimes of Bobbio
especially on days like these,
coming across an old schoolbook
and reading, in spite of myself,
with a child’s eye, smelling chalk,
dreaming among worn sleeves of golden apples;
there was a perfection
in the library of St. Gall,
the glass-lit carvings on Columban’s tomb,
in the lives which promised, which we’d never match.
SOUTH
Lake waters close over the last stone.
I straighten, a man who should know better
but the crowds are elsewhere, in formal gardens
or picnicking on the lawn. an old boat,
a smooth path; no one has been here in months
and the place is, reed for reed, as I remember;
only the sky louring westerly and the sun
higher and hung with that pallor which comes before a storm
chills the hour like a sudden spit of hail in summer.
You forget how a lake reflects its depth in the slate
of an angry sky; it gathers like a bruise
and we all have bruises enough for sure, more than enough,
our limbs, the stiffness of an old man’s
in that Bible story no one recalls for sure.
Back now, through the long meadow, its thick grasses untouched by machines,
to the comfort of portrait and landscape, the steady hand.
Golfers in the distance move silently between ponds
fringed with dwarf rhododendrons, the poor man’s Augusta,
and further along is an arbutus, native here
if it hasn’t died back, like much else
you notice when walking alone for the first time.
The cathedral I never visited is small now, almost hunched,
the house where we stayed lost among others,
and I’m in that familiar quandary, a stranger yet not quite,
a feeling of recognition without entitlement, stepping into self-contained places
built to outlast, my presence no more than an echoing footstep.
But isn’t that why we travel – to be alone,
and why the houses that receive us have a high window
looking onto flowers we know we’ll never pick?
And why gardens have a peculiar beauty in winter,
their bleak fingers a promise of their coming back to life, suddenly,
when the mind is exhausted from trying to imagine it.
Night falls slowly, the moon rises behind a hill.
The far south. A place my childish mind conjured up
while I sat in bare halls or the back
of my father’s van as he made insurance calls -
Munster, ever warm, stream-stones gleaming at midday,
mountains greening from blue as long light made its way overhead;
above all, fables; here we had only the passing rumour
our hills no obstacles for giants’ feet
no uplands drew and held the sun all day.
And on Christmasses I traced the dotted routes of Aegean liners,
freighters in the tropics: the fag-end of an era
that trapped me in it as it guttered out.
Now all is being rendered, picture, word and song
and stories thread through each other like a mesh
where brightness is trapped sometimes, a net lifted to the air
to let the sun shake free in diamond drops.
AN OLD SUN
Coming away from the house, my aunt bent over her flowers,
I look round and try to imagine here under flood,
that placid sullen grey like an unmoving animal,
and her, trapped and restless, watching an October night come down
from and into dark, lit for the instant
of impact, as if a cloud had shattered.
My mind’s eye skims a surface
four foot deep in parts, level with the second step, she said
and somehow what I’d never seen has been banished.
How a memory not mine can smooth out lawns, enrich mould, give
to my sight what was wanting five days or more in everything I’d endeavoured!
Summer was here, but my mind had been anchored
to a tic of disappointment on opening drapes at first light.
She, with an armful of dried leaves, straightens like an old sun coming up.
EARTHENWARE
On a morning such as this
you can read only
New England in the fall.
The tips of the broadest leaves
have begun the long curl
to extinction; no rain can call them back.
Birdsong is wrung out.
Everywhere the silence of tired throats,
the onset of a long rest,
death or recovery among the hedgerows,
the air is peculiar,
it has the rarity of warmth
filtered through the first chill.
And the words of long-boned
and bearded men are travelling
like migratory birds;
they are old earthenware on shelves,
a fault in the glaze,
a sealed jar shaken, its seeds pristine.
THE OTHER END OF THE LINE
The confusions of age happen very lightly, like feathers.
Was there a Mc in that girl's name at school,
the one who went not to College but into some void
from which her return is still expected?
Where did it come from, this facility of talking
of fifty years as if it were six months ago?
And to think that morning has been essentially the same
for half a billion years - unnoticed but what does that matter,
creatures struggling out of the mud toward their own eclipse,
free of the burden of having to become gods.
It should be a consolation that the earth will cool
like a cinder, more slowly than numbers can tease out,
as if that could put a brake on the quickening pain of loss
for a vanished thought that was never more than a spark
moving crazily from one nerve end to another.
What does the age of the universe matter when you reach
for the top shelf and miss by the width of a fingernail –
that first positioning of a chair is as much of gravity
as you need to know, the body moving back towards
the centre, the joints and muscles locking like sentries.
And you embark like a knight on a grail quest
on a series of lifts and movements in search of the lost stretch.
It does you good, these contortions – the comfort of discomfort,
as they shouted in your ear when you did push-ups at school,
and you learn, as if you needed to, the simplicity of pain.
Meanwhile, the mind is always elastic in its evasion
of pain – there are so many ways of saying without saying,
moving within the maze, missing the light.
They’re gone. So many. Gone too, those still here,
whose lives are streams branching away from an old well.
They still come in the night, singly, in pairs, as though
taking it in turns to appear from nowhere; they must be
restless always, invisible like stars in daylight
then suddenly there, stinging, hail from a cloudless sky.
So many. And from what seems so short a life,
and you’re afraid to name them, as if doing so would cast
them out forever – so too, will a word remain frozen,
unpronounced for fear uttering it would trigger rejection.
It’s nearing the point where vanished and solid
are in equilibrium, that odd hour of wisdom and rest,
bright without sunlight. First stillness, then the air thickens
as if cities were gathering round an enclosed yard
in a village far from the reach of maps. The sounds
become the call of birds migrating from one state to the next
strung out against the sky, and a figure leaning at a back door
is part of the passing, knows it, and is content.
At that moment everything is safe; those voices
from a dead time are resting in whatever breeze there is,
and there is no fear of mention or recall,
nothing needs to be drawn down or examined.
Be thankful it lasts as long as it does, or comes at all,
that when it goes there are still plans for the day
with all its small anxieties – will that phone be answered,
what is that alien dot flashing across the screen?
And that it’s never too late to measure your life
by what you’ve given to others – inadvertently, the best part,
the streets through which they stride will always be yours,
and everything they’ve made their own will be a covering
for your age, an armour against the battering of errors,
the silence on the other end of the line.
GUITAR
Time is become a stillness within walls.
In the heat of day
old white crockery set out to catch
that light, peculiar as grace, that comes
with luck, for two weeks each year,
has a line of dust the cloth missed;
and the old guitar, once passed round
like songs or good china, warps with each change of season.
Yet the few strings left cause
the walls, the bookcase, to assume a forgotten gloss,
as a room about to be left forever
becomes more than its years, transfigured, imperishable
in the fragility of a moment that is nothing
but its own truth. My fingers run
along a past I never understood
but for my somehow being part of it;
the strongest light with winter either side,
the finest food eaten dressed for a journey.
CITIES
A river runs under the house.
Sometimes when the stars are out and the last
car has made its way along the rain-slicked road,
I imagine the dead souls moving noiselessly
about their business: in a great, old city
such as I’ve dreamt or read. Their eyes are fixed
not on the Pole star, but Venus, mild, modest.
Even the dead cannot look too far above the horizon.
And sometimes, on attic stairs, I smell
food that was cooked before I was born.
These are the ghosts that hover, a detritus
for the psychic archaeologist: I find it
a strange comfort that the drudgery of cooking
should outlive the hubris of the man of the house;
that we live and walk continually with the unseen,
the weeds we think we’ve killed off, for which
we are at worst a minor inconvenience;
or imagine a walk at dusk, past hundreds of birds
suddenly silent, roosting within reach,
beyond our power to touch.
And I think, more often now, of the buildings
you’d planned; there was always the sense
of radiating from a centre, a curvature of wires
like nerves; support was all, and from it, breadth and light.
They were cities of the air, and we both knew it;
the best kind, the kind we carried
from a cinema out into the little night.
You never got the chance to impose your thought
upon material. I suspect deep down, you balked
at destruction, the sweeping away of what an age cherished;
I know the sight of rubble appalled you
as did the churning up of hedges – that picture
of the trenches, remember, before and after?
But it never left you that in the spring
of nineteen-nineteen, birds began to sing
in the shattered trees.